Elena Ferrante’s novel The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth and final novel in her Neopolitan series, has made the final five shortlist for Italy’s Premio Strega prize – and not without controversy. Ferrante was first nominated for Italy’s biggest prize 23 years ago, with her first novel L’amore molesto (Troubling Love). It didn’t […]
Imagine the closing of an entire newspaper/magazine/portal online because judges deem one simple phrase published, on one of its pages, to be defamatory. No need to imagine it, as it’s already happened this month – not in China, as one might think, but in the heart of the EU; Italian judges, deeming one phrase published […]
While everyone’s getting caught up in the buzz about The Artist, I have a shameful confession to make: silent movies have always bored the bunions off of me – as a child I gnashed my teeth in despair when Charlie Chaplin or, god forbid, Harold Lloyd came on the television. That’s not to write off […]
Poor Gordon Brown – he must look with no small amount of envy across Europe to Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi looks set to romp home in this weekend’s European Election vote with his Popolo della Liberta party expected to win somewhere around 40% of the vote (which combined with their righ-wing alliance partners the Lega […]
Silvio Berlusconi has always vaunted two major talents – an ability to control the media (both his own – a substantial slice of tv and print – as well as those supposedly independent), and a masterful ability to keep together seemingly shakey partnerships. It’s against this backdrop that his second wife, Veronica Lario, dropped a […]
There are chilling moments in the life of any straniero when they realise that, with all the reflection, study, and will that certain ways of thinking, produced by local culture, tradition, and a very different history, will always be beyond them. These are moments, more often than not, conjured up out of hot-air when politicos […]
Responding to some ill-defined public outrage (in part manafactured by newspapers owned or close to the Berlusconi family), both Prime Minister Berlusconi and the speaker of the house of deputies, Gianfranco Fini, called for swift and decisive action – not against builders responsible, in Abruzzo, for using shoddy materials and cutting costs, nor against civil […]
You know you’re getting spammed in the comments when you receive a gushing tribute, to a post you wrote about Walter Veltroni, saying that the topic is ‘quite trendy on the net at the moment’. You can say many things about Walter Veltroni – and many do – but to the best of this blog’s […]
Economists at LaVoce have issued a proposal for the Government to easily raise 172 million euro that can be set aside for reconstruction work. In belt-tightening times you’d imagine the government would be all ears, but I’ve the suspicion that this is a proposal that will be deftly ignored. In June the country is set […]
A state of emergency has been declared, funds are being allocated, and politics has been set aside momentarily in order to respond to the devestating earthquake which hit Abruzzo yesterday. It’s not a time for reflection, as Silvio Berlusconi pointed out in his press conference yesterday brushing aside the suggestions that this earthquake had already […]
